American Roots/Experimental Music John R. Campbell

“My blues is built on human beings on land, see how they live, see their heartaches and the shifts they go through." --Lonnie Johnson

I make folk music. Not the music usually associated with that genre, but folk music in the original sense: using vernacular materials and techniques to create, not products, but expressions. Though my music is experimental, its immediacy honors certain bonds common to American roots music. Yet I’m not interested in reproducing past musics. Folk music is not created for the museum, the marketplace, or the academy, but rather for the moment of immersion. For me, immersion in music is immersion in place. My physical surroundings frame, inform, and infuse the music in tangible, if sometimes oblique, ways. I've recorded over a dozen albums of American landscape music. Below are some sample cuts.